A BitTorrent client developed by the Delft University of Technology and the VU University Amsterdam brings dynamic social recommendations to the BitTorrent world.
Tribler version 4.0 takes the concept of what is popular and gives it a solid Web 2.0 twist. Pandora and Last.fm style, Tribler recommends downloads based on a user’s history.
The client also supports YouTube browsing. The engine behind Tribler uses data gathered from viewing YouTube videos in combination with download history to suggest new videos to watch.
The confluence of various Web 2.0 ideas into a BitTorrent client may be a logical step forward in terms of development, but will a swiss army approach have a large appeal to a broad audience?
Triber has been designed as part of a research project that has 20 scientists working on it with €6 million to spend. As a research project it is interesting, yet if the concept is strong it will only be proven by future downloads and use of Tribler by the BitTorrent using community.
(via NewTeeVee)
the concept is logical – but it will only be of use to those with very esoteric taste who are geared towards hard to find items.
Those geared towards popular downloads will eventually find out what would normally be suggested to them
And of course, the privacy issue looms.
Yet another entrant into the semantic web. Not too bad. MIT Media Labs is working on some other interesting technology in this area — the principle in the same at least, developing software applications that learn from user preferences and use those preferences to refine search at a high level. I am guessing that’s really going to be the next big thing.
Once you get the algorithms properly refined, it is a whole lot more effective for you to develop the functionality that will allow your web service to learn how to search from the user than it is to try to hard code these behaviors from the beginning.
It’s like the transaction between a purely directory based web to what we have today. Bit Torrent is a really good test bed for an idea like this. You have a system in which a very large amount of people are using a product consistently to download a very similar set of things. A lot of food for the algorithm if you will.
If it works, it’s bound to be interesting.
if it is a research project, who owns it?
Thats very nice. I’ll try it as i use many torrents.
The only thing that worries me is that a lot of people use bitTorrent to download less than legal things. I can’t imagine an application that keeps a detailed record of everything you download would be welcome to those types of people, who, judging by the types of files found on most tracker sites, make up the majority of bitTorrent users…-Metagg
- I would say –
– have you seen the democracy player? … seems alot better –
– this is probably more semantic though / which is the trend – RB
is this legal?Will u report any1 who downloads illegal stuff from ur social list?
Cool social torrent tracker!!!